Here’s a list of tools we’ve purchased over the years that have served us well.  I would recommend these to anyone in the hobby.

  • Soldering Station – This is a good quality soldering station for a decent price.  I like the controls and how well it performs
  • Soldering Iron Replacement – Aoyue B004 replacement soldering iron.  We accidentally damaged our first one by letting it get too hot for too long
  • Soldering Iron Tip Cleaner – Tip cleaner replacements we’ve purchased
  • Soldering Helping Hands – A solid soldering assistance tool
  • Solder – Good quality solder perfect for the soldering lighting wires and strips
  • Heat Shrink Butt Wire Electrical Crimp Connectors – As of 2016 we moved to using these in place of soldering and the experience was AMAZING.  Have used over 6000 of these so far without a single issue
  • Crimping Tool – The crimping tool used on the heat shrink butt connectors mentioned above
  • Heat Gun – This heat gun is great and very high quality.  What we use to shrink the heat shrink butt connectors mentioned above
  • Heat Shrink Tubing – When we don’t use the heat shrink butt connectors we use these to seal open / exposed wires and it works well
  • Butane Torch – We’ve also used this butane torch to the heat shrink tubing as well as the heat shrink butt connectors
  • Butane Fuel – Fuel made to refill the butane torch listed above
  • Glue Gun – Great high quality glue gun that even allows you to unplug it for up to five minutes and still use it.  We’ve used it for a number of things but mainly for sealing items
  • Glue – Perfect glue for the glue gun mentioned above
  • Multimeter – A tool we use all the time to take all sorts of power and resistance measurements.  I would highly recommend to anyone in this hobby
  • Wire Snips – Good quality wire snips…a must have in this hobby
  • Wire Stripper – Good quality wire strippers…a must have in this hobby
  • Wire Toner / Tracer – Used this to tone out end of cable when our labeling has failed us.  Good quality product and you’ll definitely find it handy
  • Kill-A-Watt Electricity Usage Monitor – Great tool for taking quick power measurements, of multiple types, from a standard NEMA 5-15 interface
  • Pixel Pliers – These will save your fingers and hands much pain when inserting thousands of pixel nodes into props.  These are amazing!!